When @Irene Met Hurricane Irene

When Hurricane Irene started moving up the eastern seaboard, Irene Tien, a 28-year-old New Yorker, provided a punch line for her coworkers.

“I’m very, very calm and pretty relaxed and laid-back—pretty much the opposite of a hurricane,” says Ms. Tien. “I guess that’s funny.”

Irene Tien

Irene Tien describes herself as the “pretty much the opposite of a hurricane.”

It became less funny when people started mistaking Ms. Tien for the hurricane on Twitter. On the social-messaging service where people post 140-character messages that anyone can read, Ms. Tien has since 2006 had the handle “Irene.”

Her posts are typically breezy. One from March: “Love the fact that in New York I can go to two different bookstores dedicated entirely to cookbooks.” In May: “Apparently constantly refreshing a delivery tracking page on FedEx does not make packages come faster, yet I can’t stop doing it.”

But today, her Twitter followers are likelier to see messages informing them of transit shutdowns and problems with voice-data networks. That’s because Hurricane Irene had co-opted her account.

Here’s what happened. A feature of Twitter is that people can send public messages to each other by typing an @ symbol in front of their handle, and last week, Ms. Tien noticed a big upsurge in the number of messages she was getting. Someone with the handle Caramel_Dreams pleaded, “Dear @irene can u like stop please?” From Broadwayallday, “hey @irene can u make a hard right for us? there’s this triangle in Bermuda i think you’d love.”

She shot back in a public post, “Btw, tweeting @irene doesn’t deliver any messages to the hurricane. Sorry.”

Her co-workers found that hilarious. Ms. Tien happens to work at digital-media firm Huge Inc., where she and her colleagues help businesses figure out how to communicate through social media—like Twitter. She was on a cruise with her co-workers in Huge’s Los Angeles office when she got an email from her company’s associate creative director, Ross Morrison, with the subject line, “Um … we HAVE to do something with this …” Another co-worker chimed in, “I don’t think Irene has a choice.”

But her colleagues made a case for it. She wouldn’t have to do anything. They would take over her Twitter account and post funny, but useful, updates about the hurricane. She agreed. (She had had a few drinks on the booze cruise but says that had nothing to do with it.) Now, she says, “It adds a bit of levity to the situation, but it also provides accurate information about what to do.”

Things are gathering steam. On Saturday, a representative from the Federal Emergency Management Agency emailed Ms. Tien’s colleague, asking if @irene could help them with their outreach. (A suggested tweet from the FEMA rep: “People should protect themselves from me, I’m dangerous. Visit http://m.fema.gov for tips on your phone.”) Meanwhile, mixed in with the informative updates, Ms. Tien’s coworkers—who happen to be in New York themselves—are having fun with this. A recent post: “My first time in Kitty Hawk! Where’s the Wright Bros. museum?”

The reaction has been largely positive, with the twitterati thanking @irene for her thoughtfulness. But some have questioned Ms. Tien’s motives, asking whether she is doing this as a publicity trick.

“I’m not doing this for followers or for me,” she says. “That was a part of the hesitation that I had about initially letting them do it.” She adds that she knows from her work that on the Internet, “some people are always going to say negative things.” In any case, Ms. Tien herself has nothing to do with the actual messages being posted. She’s letting her colleagues in New York do that, so that she can enjoy her weekend: she happens to be in Los Angeles, visiting friends.